Passage to Silicon Valley- 005 Amanpreet Kaur

Aman is a data scientist at SolarCity. In this episode, she talks about her journey in the US. She was an international student coming from Punjab, India, and she finished her master and phD studies at UC San Diego and UC Merced. Currently, she’s working in the Silicon Valley as a data scientist.

She explains how data scientists work. She uses mostly Python and Matlab to help her process data. One good advantage of Matlab is that it’s simple and can help you test data quickly. The down side is that it’s very expensive and not open sourced.

When Aman was about to graduate from her doctoral degree, she was open to work anywhere in the world. However, since she didn’t consider doing a post-doc, her choices were limited. In the end, she decided to join SolarCity (because SolarCity is awesome!).

She feels that it’s great for data scientists to live here in the Silicon Valley since there are lots of companies and meet ups for data science. Almost every company wants to gain more revenue by learning their users’ behaviors and improving their business models, therefore, data scientists are in huge demand.

Aman feels that studying abroad, deciding to pursue a doctoral degree, and choosing her career path after graduation are all pivotal moments to her. Overall, they are all great choices looking back now and she’s happy!

Cooking is her hobby. She improvises a lot if there is no matching items (just like the show- Cutthroat Kitchen). She also enjoys indoor rock climbing. You can check Groupon’s monthly pass for Planet Granite if you are interested in doing rock climbing too.

Aman shares how she improves herself by setting daily goals. She also does a lots of tasks that is out of her comfort zone. The rewards are huge because she no longer has to rely on others to get things done. She thinks good data scientists should know-

1. how to implement and how to process (coding skills),

2. how valuable the data is.

Aman’s prediction for the data science field is a combination of automated things, such as intelligent devices to help people live an easier life.